Not so fast

Something from an essay by Richard Rorty – ‘Globalization, the Politics of Identity and Social Hope,’ in Philosophy and Social Hope (1996). See what you think.

As I see it, the emergence of feminism, gay liberation, various sorts of ethnic separatism, aboriginal rights, and the like, simply add further concreteness to sketches of the good old egalitarian utopia…In that society, people who wanted to think of themselves as Basque first, or black first, or women first, and citizens of their countries or a global cooperative commonwealth second, would have little trouble doing so. For the institutions of that commonwealth would be regulated by John Stuart Mill’s dictum that everybody gets to do what they like as long as it doesn’t interfere with other people’s doing the same.

Well – it was 1996, which probably helps to explain it, but that passage strikes me as way too easy. Basque first, women first – right; but what if it’s Saudi first, or men first? What if you pick the hard examples instead of the easy ones? What happens then? Is it just an accident that he chose easy examples? I don’t know – but I can’t help thinking that he should have realized that ‘women first’ necessarily implies ‘men first’ and that then should lead to the thought that ‘men first’ could very easily include ‘men who define maleness as superiority to and dominance of women’ among the men who want to think of themselves as men first; and that that puts the whole easy formula in question. That’s one of the rocks we keep tripping over in this identity thing – for some people, it is the case that their identity is closely involved with the right or ability to subordinate other people, and/or to deny them the ability to think of themselves as whatever they like first. And the emergence of, for instance, ‘ethnic separatism, aboriginal rights, and the like’ does not necessarily work toward a more egalitarian utopia; it can work for the opposite. What if part of the ‘ethnic’ in ethnic separatism consists largely of the segregation and subordination of women? I bet we can – right now, all by ourselves, with no help – think of some ethnic separatisms of which that is the case. I can. Can you? I knew you could.

So – it’s too easy. And he wrote it in such a way that it’s too easy – he wrote it in such a way that it slides neatly around the hard part. Objection, Your Honor.

Acts injurious to others require a totally different treatment. Encroachment on their rights; infliction on them of any loss or damage not justified by his own rights; falsehood or duplicity in dealing with them; unfair or ungenerous use of advantages over them; even selfish abstinence from defending them against injury – these are fit objects of moral reprobation, and, in grave cases, of moral retribution and punishment.

So you can think of yourself as Haydn-lover first, and citizen of Auchtermuchty second, and subject of Her Britannic Majesty 147th. Think on, as much as you like. But once you start trying to ban Mozart, or insisting that the women of Dundee wear plastic bags covering their kneecaps, or refusing to pay income tax, no, you do not get to do what you like.

What d’ya mean “objection”? “Wrong” was the word you were looking for.

In “Contingency, Irony and Solidarity” Rorty states that there’s an irreducible tension between individual self-construction and solidarity with others. Constructing yourself as a male chauvinist whilst acknowledging the feminist is an example. Rorty sees no timeless principle that tells us how to resolve this – in fact, Rorty doesn’t seem to see timeless principles for anything – we just have to make something up or resolve it by force. So if we see the Mill dictum not as a self-evident truth, but as an invention for peacefully resolving a certain type of dispute between individuals then I think we can have identity politics and maximal egalitarianism whilst still being compatible with Rortyism.

Being a pragmatist [or the heir thereunto], it would be unlikely Rorty would have timeless principles for anything. What is mostly held against him, in the criticism I have seen [and which links to OB’s point], is that he never tries to suggest any forms of resolution that work outside an assumed framework of prosperous liberalism, or that would facilitate reaching such a context, when starting from somewhere else.

Beautifully put, chapeau — though at least Rorty doesn’t entertain any great illusions as to the impact of philosophy on the extra-campus world. Earlier on in the essay he concedes: “I cannot believe that the degree of utopian hope manifested by the public .. is greatly influenced by changes in opinion among philosophy professors.”

Well, quite. I was doing the charitable reading thing, or trying to. Same with the sentences I omitted that Cathal supplied – I omitted them in order to narrow the focus and dispute one claim at a time. Rorty makes quite a few absurd claims in that article. Maybe he means something more subtle or sophisticated – but then why does he say what he says?

But the Rwanda and Bosnia slaughters weren’t about mere ethnic separatism but ethnic cleansing – the very antithesis of Mill’s dictum. Rwanda was probably more about poor people killing each other for land. If everyone had the same chances would it have happened? So is it a case of Rorty who needing to learn the lessons of ethnic cleansing or governments needing to learn more from Mill?

But the two are not radically separate, at least not in practice. That’s another problem with what Rorty says there – he makes thinking of oneself as ‘Basque first’ sound so anodyne, so okay; but is it? The trouble is, when people think of themselves as MyGroup first, they tend to think of other people as NotMyGroup at the same time, and that tends to be a hostile thought rather than a merely neutral one. The Balkans catastrophe surely (re-)taught us that. That’s more obvious when the group thinking of itself as MyGroup first is a powerful dominant privileged group – which is why it was evasive and unhelpful of Rorty to cite only underdog groups – but it’s true in both directions. Rorty obscured that problem, and made the whole thing sound much safer and easier and more right-on than it is.

Yes, I see what you mean. You’re coming to it from a position of realism: identity politics often goes along with chauvinism. But I can accept Rorty’s view if I consider it as utopian: it requires the creation of a public that accepts Mill’s dictum.

Ah, now that’s very interesting. I’ve been re-reading Russell Jacoby’s End of Utopia, too. I wonder if it’s reasonable to think about utopias that require the impossible of people. In a way that’s what utopias are about, but in another way it’s not: they can be models of the difficult but possible. But I think the idea that humans could ever reliably and permanently abandon the identity-hatred link is…fantasy. I suppose that’s one thing I’ve become a complete and convinced pessimist about.

Rorty sees human solidarity as being based on a recognition of our common ability to suffer. This allows us to show compassion to people who are very different from us. Doesn’t the charitable response of people from the West to the victims of disasters like the tsunami shows that this isn’t too unreasonable an idea?

The charitable response of people in general to victims of disasters shows that, but I don’t see the relevance. The charitable response is hardly permanent. People can oscillate between helping and harming in a matter of hours.

Remember the earthquakes in Turkey and Greece? That looked like the first chance for a solution to the Cyprus problem in decades. Charitable responses to disasters are just that, they’re not a lasting change. (Look at the aftermath of Katrina for another glaring example. Bush talked a lot of guff and then did nothing. Big surprise.)

Charitable responses are fleeting, but I think they can become the basis for more permanent change. Didn’t campaigns against slavery start out as charitable responses? Movements for building solidarity face difficulties and setbacks – the failure of the US government with regard to Katrina is an example – but you haven’t given up on the idea of the US as a group of people capable of mutual assistance, have you?

Andy. OK, maybe about Mill, he’s a Utopian. But the lack of practical applicability renders this sort of pipe-dreaming pointless, and begs a question. If the considerable downsides of multicultural dogma – the obsequious toleration of bullying and oppression – outweigh its lofty and largely unachievable ambitions, then it’s probably not worth holding a flame to, is it ? May as well be Communist.

Rorty/Mill isn’t the same as multiculti dogma because it doesn’t reify groups and downgrade the members. It is possible to be consistent with R/M and intervene to protect an individual in a group if the group is interfering in that individual’s preference.

Not exactly, no; but in any case that’s just another example: the former slaves were abandoned to their fate.

I’m not clear about what you’re arguing. I’m not saying anything about ‘the idea of the US as a group of people capable of mutual assistance,’ I’m saying Rorty’s idea about putting one’s group identity first is not such a safe, harmless, cheery idea as the quoted passage claims it is.

There’s no such thing as Rorty/Mill; Rorty cited Mill’s much-cited harm principle, but that doesn’t make him a Millian; much less does it make Mill a Rortyan.

I fused Rorty and Mill because I thought they were agreed on Mill’s dictum. I didn’t mean to imply that they agreed on everything.

I was arguing that the identity-hatred link need not be insoluble if we consider our shared capacity for suffering. Instead of trying to hurt or exterminate people who don’t believe all the things we do, we let them live their own lives – and occasionally help them in disasters – because the alternative would be cruel. By referring to the tsunami and slavery I was trying to give concrete examples of this idea in attempt to show that it didn’t require the impossible of people. You used Katrina as an example of the fragility of this response, but I was saying that K. is seen as a failure against the backround of the normal expectations that a nation should help out its members in a crisis. This expectation was not natural, but created by hundreds of years of nation-building. If it possible – though difficult – to do this with a diverse nation, then it might be possible to do this with the world.

I don’t think the identity-hatred link is necessarily insoluble, exactly – but I think the risk of the link is always there. I suppose what happened in ex-Yugoslavia is one huge reason for that – people had lived as neighbors for decades and then almost overnight turned homicidal. That simple fact scares the piss out of me. And come to think of it, Amartya Sen says exactly the same thing happened in India in 1947. So yeah, I think people can in the right conditions learn to do better, but I also don’t think identity-cherishing is a safe toy to play with. I think universalism (or Appiah’s cosmopolitanism) is a much safer way to go. Not easy; but safer.

I’m not sure about universalism. I see identity-cherishing of the Rorty type, made peacable by Mill’s dictum, as being a necessary corrective to universalist pretensions of a potentially dictatorial state, which I think is what Rorty was primarily concerned about in that passage. Identities of the Rorty-Mill type dissolve potentially harmful groups into harmless, eccentric individuals. If these individuals define themselves by their chosen identities first and by their membership of a state second, then the state has to prove itself covenient to them. It can’t coerce the citizens into conforming to a so-called universal standard of belief or practice.

Doesn’t the Mill dictum allow for coercion where the assertion of an identity harms others? I’m not saying that all forms of identity are to be tolerated – in fact, some forms will have to be significantly distorted to fit in – but I do think that individuals should have the first say in how they want to define themselves. The definition should then be trimmed to prevent harm to others. Also, by prioritising individual definition, the state will have to justify its activity to the people and thus be democratically accountable.

Yes but there’s a difference between allowing individuals to have the first say in how they want to define themselves (it’s hard to know how one would stop them anyway) and actually promoting identity. I’m pretty much talking about the promotion level – about discourse, rhetoric, jargon.

I suppose I’m using identity promotion of the kind we’re discussing as a proxy for individualism. It is useful to say “I’m X first” if you’re confronted by a state that demands your obedience regardless of your preferences. If the society is divided into warring tribes then the Mill dictum should be emphasised. By writing that I want individuals to have the first say in defining themselves, I mean in terms of importance rather than time. Such an arrangement means that the state has to accommodate identity – and constrain it with reference to the lowest common denominator of welfare – rather that suppress it entirely to fit in with the projects of its controllers.

“It is useful to say “I’m X first” if you’re confronted by a state that demands your obedience regardless of your preferences.”

Is it? Why? Why isn’t it more useful to say “I have these preferences”? In any case, sometimes we want the state to demand your obedience regardless of your preferences. If your preference is to commit murder or rape, or to beat up your dependents, or to drive dangerously, or to deposit your effluents in the nearest river – the state needs to demand your obedience despite your preferences.

A state that “has to accommodate identity” is a state that will do nothing about honour killings, for instance.

The state will stop rape, murder, environmental damage and honour killings because the identity expression I’m defending always assumes the application of Mill’s dictum. The state that demands your obedience regardless of your preferences is the state that conscripts you into a war machine to satisfy the bloodlust of a dictator; it’s the state that burns you at the stake for having the wrong religion; it’s the state that tries to reprogram your sexuality so that will reproduce for the good of the motherland. By accommodation I don’t mean acceptance of everything a person wants to say and do. I mean that the onus is on the state to stop you harming others and nothing else.

Well I don’t see where identity comes into it. It’s just standard Millian libertarianism; I don’t see what identity adds – though you did say you’re using it as a proxy for individualism. But why not just stay with individualism? You don’t seem to be saying anything about identity that’s really specific to identity – or if you are I’m not understanding it.

Why don’t I indeed? I think I’ve been working out the consequences of the Rorty-Mill identity as we’ve been debating. I started out thinking of group identity (which, I presume, is how you define identity) and then it gradually dissolved in my mind into individualism by the acid of Mill’s dictum. It was when I reached this realisation that I made the comment above that “Identities of the Rorty-Mill type dissolve potentially harmful groups into harmless, eccentric individuals.” I’ve called this form of identity a proxy for individualism because I now see it as one way in which it is formed: the person asserts a group identity, they come to see they can’t have it all their own way and so the identity is then moulded into an individual form by the negotiation of its expression with everyone else.